It is well known that a ball of dough can be molded into various shapes and sizes to produce food products. Traditionally, once the desired dough was properly mixed, the dough was rolled to the proper thickness and then cut into the shape needed to produce the food product. However, this method is labor-intensive and costly with respect to retail food products and restaurant services.
Over the years, machines have been utilized to overcome this problem by mechanically forming dough into the desired thickness and shape. Such machines are known in the art and are generally shown in McCarney U.S. Pat. No. 6,205,914, McCarney U.S. Pat. No. 6,244,167 and McCarney U.S. Pat. No. 7,140,864. These patents are incorporated by reference herein and background information illustrating hand-operated tortilla press assemblies that form a ball of dough into a tortilla shell. These approaches overcame many of the problems in the prior art with respect to producing various sizes of shells by utilizing a ring or disk structure which dictates the peripheral configuration and thickness of the resulting tortilla shell.
Although such prior art approach were generally effective, shortfalls exist. For example is it desirable to improve on the distribution of dough evenly throughout. Moreover, current approaches lacked the ability to provide sharp imprinting of a pattern, design, or mark on to the press dough. In current approaches, attempts to emboss patterns can result in uneven or marred images.
It should be appreciated that there remains a need for a tortilla press that addresses the aforementioned shortcomings. The present invention solves these needs and others.